Category: Home Cooking

Au Revoir, Cook’s Illustrated

So Peter rearranged the kitchen with nifty new Metro shelving, and in the process made me acutely conscious of how many issues of Cook’s Illustrated I’ve got piled up. They seem sort of redundant now, because I bought access to the recipe database on the Cook’s website, and I can’t remember when I last sat down and browsed through them for ideas. In fact, I don’t think I’ve even read the last few issues.

Which is no way to treat what I used to call my Favorite. Food Mag. Ever. It’s the magazine that essentially taught me how to cook. Sure, it has its problems (scroll to “Cook’s Illustrated in the Flesh”), but I owe this publication a lot: my lemon pound cake is fluffy and lemony-tasting, I can whip up crepes in a jiffy, and I know which canned tomatoes are worth buying (Muir Glen, FYI).

Looking through my back issues, I realize I’ve been subscribing for ten years. That makes me more than a little nostalgic. Especially when I see my favorite issue, the one that has come in the handiest over the years and is totally warped from countertop puddles and stained on every page. It’s from April 1997.

Its secrets include key lime pie, chicken and dumplings, soda bread, braised lamb shoulder chops, electric knife sharpener reviews, canned tomato tastings. All of these things are essential to my repertoire. I made the corned beef recipe once, and it was awesome. I still haven’t made the buttermilk doughnuts, which kills me, and now I see there’s a recipe for braised celery. April 1997–it’s the gift that keeps on giving!

Indulge me while I get a little misty-eyed…

In April 1997, I was living in Bloomington, Indiana, in a giant old house with three other people. Bloomington was a creepy oasis of semi-culture in the black hole of redneck Indiana, but that house was a fantastic place to live. Each of us cooked two nights a week, so a good part of my grad school life was spent sitting around with cookbooks figuring out what was within my grasp, involved ingredients that I could get at Kroger or the Sahara Mart, and wouldn’t bankrupt the house kitty.

My roommate Jeremy was once heard to shout from behind the swinging kitchen door, “Hey, do you know where we can get whole baby goat in this town?” Jen made some casserole involving an upside-down frozen pizza, as well as an exploding-heart Valentine’s cake. James simmered huge vats of red sauce and sausage. When I wasn’t doing classics from the ol’ Cook’s, it was something Indian from Madhur Jaffrey–the only cookbook I have that’s as stained as this April 1997 issue of Cook’s.

Enough of memory lane, but Cook’s was a lot better then. The recipes were things I wanted to cook. They seem to have painted themselves into a corner these days, as they’ve burned through all the good classic dishes, and nowadays we get stories on turkey tetrazzini. Christopher Kimball himself said they’d never do a story on fresh pasta, for instance, because it was too fancy, and the new companion magazine, Cook’s Country, reveals the editors’ real–and really nasty–predilections: for marshmallows in everything, against heirloom tomatoes, for even more wasteful uses of Saran wrap. If I’d known where this enterprise was headed, I would’ve quit in April 1997.

So I’m chucking my subscription. I think I’ve graduated–and it’s satisfying to look through this giant stack of magazines and see how much I’ve learned. Frankly, I retained more information from Cook’s, especially about the magical world of egg proteins, than I ever did from any class about medieval Arabic poetry. Hell, yesterday I couldn’t even remember the name of the Abbasid poet who’s a lot like David Allan Coe, and I spent a lot of time working up that hard-hitting analysis.

Sure, I haven’t had the definitive, literal kung fu battle with my master, Christopher Kimball, that would prove I’m ready to make it on my own in the world. But I feel like I could kick his ass.

Goodbye, Edna Lewis!

So sad to wake up this morning and find that Edna Lewis, queen of Southern cuisine, had passed away. Here’s the the New York Times obit.

We’ve eaten her fried chicken (fried in butter and lard flavored with country ham–see, I told you she was the queen of Southern cuisine) many times chez Tamara, not to mention her apple cake with salt caramel topping.

Sniff.

(Here are links to her two most popular books on Amazon: The Taste of Country Cooking and The Gift of Southern Cooking. The latter has the life-changing fried chicken recipe in it.)

Best of RG V: The Man in the Bow Tie

Best of RG IV: The Man in the Bow Tie

The thrilling retrospective continues…and the voices are back.

“Gosh, Joanie, I’m feeling parched. I sure could use a milkshake,” goes Chachi. And just then, with the flawless timing accorded everyone in thirty-minute sitcoms, up walks Al. He’s wearing a bow tie and looking paternal. He’s holding a milkshake that looks like the milkshake to end all milkshakes, the milkshake you dream about at night: thick but not unsuckable through a straw, a pink imbued naturally with real strawberries, a mini-ziggurat of whipped cream, and a jaunty maraschino cherry on top.

“Al, that’s the coolest milkshake ever! How’d you learn to make it like that?” Joanie breathes with adoration.

“Well, Joanie, it took lots and lots of practice and experimentation. And it especially took determination, which I learned from a great man I once saw, a great man I emulate to this day…

Ack, there goes the screen, we’re feeling woozy, and then we straighten up and find ourselves in a Midtown Barnes & Noble:

April 5, 2004
Cook’s, Really Illustrated
Christopher Kimball is the editor of the most humorless, most anal, most absorbingly useful magazine ever, Cook’s Illustrated. In the long list of my random food influences–from the late, great Barton Rouse to the dire necessity of Cairo, where I was forced to pick basil out of parking lots–Cook’s Illustrated has probably taught me the most.

Not that I liked it. The magazine–ad-free, dense with text interspersed with faint little line drawings and often murky black-and-white photos–is distinctly unpalatable. Headlines are less than compelling: “Turkey Tetrazzini: Worth Saving?”

And maybe it’s a New England thing (HQ is in Boston), but they have zero sense of humor and are completely unwilling to admit that they take themselves too seriously. I recall exactly one wry turn of phrase, by Kay Rentschler. She proferred a shortcut that would “get you back to the cocktail cart in a jiffy.” She hasn’t written for the magazine since.

But after eight years of subscribing, I now sigh fondly when I read: “[DISH X] has a reputation for being heavy/greasy/bland/cafeteria-like. We tested 20/58/871 recipes to revive this obscure American staple/nostalgic standard/overwrought French classic…. I shake my head with wonder when the test kitchen cracks the case in the “What the Hell Is It?” (I’m paraphrasing) column about some now-extinct kitchen gadget discovered in a dusty cabinet. I duly wrap yet another item in plastic wrap, as recommended in the Reader’s Tips pages.

There is, however, one item that I still cannot bear: the editor’s letter, Mr. Kimball’s bimonthly words of wisdom. And boy, does he ladle on the wisdom. Every essay mentions his Vermont farm, crusty natives, joyful children bounding up the driveway, and some treacly lesson about humanity. I once got suckered into reading one that started with mention of his hippie galavanting in a VW bus. But after two columns of low-grade bohemian reverie, the story of course returned to present-day, with those beastly children bounding up the drive of the ol’ farmstead. I felt conned, and I haven’t read an editor’s letter since.

So, part of the reason I went to see this guy speak at Barnes & Noble last week was to see if he was as intensely annoying, smarmy and righteous as his editorial persona suggested.

After warming up the crowd by citing some statistics that made the crowd feel smug (number of minutes Americans want to spend cooking dinner: 15) and sharing some behind-the-scenes anecdotes (wacky salt-for-sugar-in-the-cheesecake pranks!), he showed this video that depicted the Cook’s staff discussing very seriously its mission, along with images of armies of blind taste-testers, clad in white and studiously nibbling things out of plastic cups. It all looked kind of like a “science” fair project I might’ve rigged up in fifth grade because I couldn’t be bothered with breeding fruit flies: One test component was always included twice, to check for tasters’ consistency, Kimball was quick to assure us. Also a little like those photos in science journals of work at the Kinsey Institute, of people in lab coats looking very, very objective about sex.

All the results that appeared so certain on the page–this balsamic vinegar, that butter, that supermarket cheddar–are now exposed as just the product of a bunch of people locked in a room. What about chacun a  son gout? What if it turned out I liked the third-rated cheese? I’d never know, because I always just bought the top-rated brand.

Then Mr. Kimball passed around little baggies of chocolate–three different kinds, in individual numbered plastic cups–and instructed us to taste them. He asked us all to vote on which we liked best, then praised us for getting it right.

Now, I know I spent too much time hemming and hawing in grad school with other cultural relativists (back in the day–the intellectual tide seems to have shifted in the last few years), but the word right gets my back up. Especially because the third chocolate, dismissed by Mr. Kimball as a pointlessly chi-chi boutique variety, was interesting, all winy and rich, and totally different from the other two more standard chocolates. I wouldn’t have baked brownies with it, but it wasn’t wrong, just like my interpretation of a text can’t ever be wrong–stupid, maybe, and betraying inexperience (Kimball also chortled over someone who actually preferred Aunt Jemima to real maple syrup), but not wrong.

The Man in the Bow Tie went on in this vein a little while longer, and he started to sound (to me, at least) more derisory, more pleased with himself and more God-playing all the time. This audience in Barnes & Noble looked utterly adoring and enthralled, all agog at this bespectacled, hollow-cheeked pedant. Good thing he’s in charge of a cooking magazine, and not a religious cult that encourages people to commit acts of violence.

Things took a turn for the even worse during the Q&A period when a woman asked, “I find that the flavor from cake yeast is much better than from powdered yeast. Am I right?”

I slipped out the side door, and ate the rest of the wrong chocolate on the subway ride home.

Dream Dinners?

I can’t decide what I think about this. The premise, before you click away: harried women (maybe men) convene at a storefront, walk around a room assembling ingredients for 6 or 12 dinners. Everything’s pre-cut, measured, etc. They take the stuff home and fridge or freeze it. Then, when they arrive home from their harried lives, they pop one of the things in the oven and sit down to a no-fuss dinner with their families. The ingredients for 12 dinners costs $200, and of course you get the recipes and the social time with all the other harried women (and lost single dads).

I know they mean well, but mostly, I just think, “Pussies.”

OK, no. Presumably, these people will learn a wee bit more about cooking through the process, and will appreciate that these dinners are better than some Stouffer’s business, and eventually they’ll come to value food and eating and cooking more. But the reliance on boneless, skinless chicken breasts and the prominent link to nutrition info depresses me.

I really have never bought the “I just don’t have time to cook” argument. Or the “Yech–it makes such a mess” argument (especially because the latter is always coming from people with dishwashers and/or housekeepers). But maybe I’m just rigid and live in a blue state and don’t have any kids or a demanding job. I mean, I ate dates and peanut butter for dinner the other night, standing up in the kitchen, so my cooking success rate is nowhere near 100 percent, and it’s a hell of a lot lower than it was a couple of years ago, when I was just treading water as a freelancer, rather than keeping actually busy with work.

Getting over my crankiness, I guess this is all good. Whatever gets people to the table. Next time I’m in Albany (what looks like the closest one), I’ll have to check it out. Maybe I can slip big pats of butter in everyone’s baggies while I’m at it.

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